History 616 Devil's Bargains

I thought this book was overwritten. In an effort to lighten the reading load I have structured my blog partly as a quiz.
Question 1: Identify one of the author’s thoughts that he does not run into the ground within 3 paragraphs.
2. Define “vast” limitation. For extra credit define the opposite of “vast” limitation.
3. How many pages in chapter 1 do NOT contain the word “postmodern?”
4. How many pages in chapter 2 do NOT contain either the words “myth” or “mystery?”
5. How many times does the author use the term “fin de siècle” in each of chapters 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6? (I quit counting after that) (fin de siècle = French: “end of the century.” Of, relating to, characteristic of, or resembling the late 19th-century literary and artistic climate of sophistication, escapism, extreme aestheticism, world-weariness, and fashionable despair…” definition found at http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9125584)
Answers to Question 5: Chapter 2 - three. And just to preserve continuity between chapters 2 and 3 he uses the phrase in the next to last line in Chapter 2, and the first line in chapter 3. Twice each in chapters 4 and 5. In chapter 6 he uses the phrase at least five times, including twice within three paragraphs 153-4.

Most self contradictory, overused and distracting neologism: “Neonatives.” This apparently is from “neo” meaning “new” and “native” meaning “to be born.” Everyone is a native of (that is was born) somewhere. The author apparently wants to make the point that some persons who were born in places B thru Z claim/act as if they were born in place A. But I felt that repeatedly making disparaging references to such a conceit by calling them “neonatives” is distracting. What he really means in each case is “non-native.” Maybe the author is still living in his birth town/region/state. This may explain his apparent lack of wider contact with the world, which in turn might have led him to think the repeated use of “neonative” in this context was cute. Actually this person sounds like some Welshman, Scot or Yorkshireman who considers someone from the next valley as a foreigner. When I lived in Yorkshire (a county in England) my next door neighbor (30 something years old) stated that he had never been out of the county – repeat county.

Automobiles. Define “infinite places” as in “Automobile tourism spread its impact among many communities, as smaller numbers of visitors reached infinite places.” P. 149. I found his philosophical exploration of the automobile a bit “mysterious.” For example: “The automobile gave travelers freedom of movement and a broader range of experience than did railroad tourism but it did not always offer them a feeling of personal satisfaction derived from accomplishment.” (p. 168) Accomplishment? What kind of “personal” satisfaction does ANY form of transportation “offer?” He continues “Although drivers and passengers might appear enthusiastic when they arrived on the rim of the Grand Canyon, their triumph was tempered by their dependence on the very technology that their travels attempted to escape.” Is that the primary goal of travelers – “escaping technology?” Some people travel to see technology. Is it true that although some/many/most/all/ANY (?) drivers and passengers “might appear enthusiastic,” some/many/most/all/ANY (?) are in some way adversely affected by this experience. This man may actually be too sensitive for any form of transportation. How does he know of this phenomenon? In what way was their “triumph” “tempered?” For that matter what triumph? And if there was “triumph,” what evidence of “tempering?” Has the author, or anyone else observed these characteristics in the population? I have another hypothesis - The author is actually a psychoanalyst posing as a historian because psychoanalysts have even more difficulty getting non-fiction published than psychoanalysts.

Skiing. “Skiing offered a way to personally achieve the strong sense of individual control over raw nature that American travelers craved. “STRONG sense of control”, “RAW nature” – WOW! An avalanche of adjectives! My emotions are exhausted – I don’t know what to say! A population that is “CRAVING control.” The “craving” of control makes some/many/most/all/ANY(?) American travelers seem like politicians. Even Freud is reputed to have said that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. It’s a good thing the author is such a keen analyst, otherwise we might not have been enlightened with the nugget that “[l]acking dependable transportation, the Aspen [ski resort] venture was doomed.” Without this revelation, might readers have thought that in many/most tourist ventures dependable transportation was not an important factor. Raw…

Most self-evident statement “Outdoor experience, camping, fishing, skiing, and the like, offered real and unavoidable contact with nature.” - page 169. I really appreciate the author pointing out that contact with nature was ”unavoidable” in outdoor experience. That subtle characteristic of the outdoors might have escaped the less intellectual among the book’s readers. On the other hand one might postulate that such contact was INTENDED by most who participated in such an experience. What the author could have made of that if he had seen it was consciously intended. On further reflection there may be some who participate in outdoor experience who do not intend such contact – an interesting idea for a journal article (abnormal psychology).

Another quiz: How many pages in the book have a reference to Sun Valley, Idaho? Answer 62. Another question. How many more people have visited Sun Valley in person rather that via the movie Sun Valley Serenade? For that matter were the exteriors in Sun Valley Serenade really Sun Valley? (I thought the music in Orchestra Wives was better that the music in Sun Valley Serenade but Sun Valley Serenade did have Sonje Henie.) Actually Sun Valley is in second place in number of references - Aspen, Colorado has 90! I haven’t visited either place but I haven’t seen any movies with “Aspen” in the title or which featured Glenn Miller’s music so I worked off of Sun Valley instead.





One aspect of western tourism that the author overlooked was extraterrestrial tourism. This topic could have been used to further develop the “mythical”/”mysterious” aspects of the West in Chapter 2. The author could have included descriptions of some of the truly mysterious Western tourist attractions such as Roswell, New Mexico (alleged to be the only spot on earth listed in both terrestrial and extraterrestrial tourist guide books www.alienresistance.org/), Area 51 (allegedly in Nevada and allegedly the location of various mysterious United States military goings-on AND allegedly the final (?) resting (?) place of the extraterrestrial tourists who landed (?) at Roswell), the Nevada Test Site or Alamogordo, New Mexico (two of a small number of mysterious AND radioactive tourist sites, http://www.atomictestingmuseum.org/ and http://www.atomictourist.com/trinity.htm), and the Santa Cruz Mystery Spot (http://www.mysteryspot.com/). Actually, I just might contact the author with my hypothesis on how these sites are related. You see if an extraterrestrial tourist was intending to visit the Nevada Test Site for some intended or unintended contact with really raw nature, and his/her/its navigational aids were disturbed by the alleged gravitational anomalies at the Santa Cruz Mystery Spot (probably and understandably overlooked as a hazard to extraterrestrial tourist transportation) he/she/it may just have accidentally arrived at Roswell and subsequently been interred or interned at Area 51. Well, as the author pointed out in mentioning the hazards of early train travel, that’s the way tourism sometimes crumbles.

My definition of a “Devil’s Bargain” – voluntarily committing oneself to reading this book (or this blog). Incidently, this book is OK as history. It has a thesis - tourism changes things - makes its case and is well documented. It overemphasized skiing and Las Vegas and underemphasizes the beaches, the cities (eg San Francisco) and the state and national parks.

Hist 616 Cadillac Desert November 28

Through about page 250 I was profoundly and positively moved by the breadth and depth of this diatribe of the water policies of the various political, engineering and administrative actors in the western United States over the last 125 years. I remain in awe of the scholarship and plain hard work Mr. Reisner puts on display here. As a native Californian I am familiar with most of the geographic areas he describes in the state, and somewhat familiar with most of the water projects and policies he examines and explains. Beyond page 250 I guess I experienced the effects of some kind of water torture, as the myriad of geologic, hydraulic, political, economic, sociological and organizational details became too much. I began to feel that the message was so important that I wished Reisner had pursued a different organization in telling the story. It seemed like a story that cried out for maps and charts and tables. I lost track of the people, organizations, agencies, and projects. In other words I got buried/drowned. I think that if I had not been somewhat knowledgeable about the geography and policies before I read the book I would have drowned earlier.

A few concepts I thought were important: on pages 115 and 116 Reisner offered his belief that “…the Reclamation Act [of 1902], or some variation of it, was, by the end of the nineteenth century inevitable.” I am fairly sure that that kind of presentism would NOT pass muster in a graduate seminar but given the overwhelming positive contribution of the book is not fatal. His analysis though is spot on and very important – “To resist a federal reclamation program was to block all further migration to the West and to ensure disaster for those who were already there – or for those who were on their way.” It does though beg the question on how the “system” that Reisner describes evolved, because Reisner clearly describes how the water programs were not designed democratically nor directly in the interests of a large number of migrants, but rather apparently for a few entrepreneurs. I don’t believe you could EVER sell the idea that ANY politician believed they were allocating the huge sums of money involved to help working or middle class people irrigate their small farms. He seems to try to say that again on pages 157-158.

What remains inexplicable for me is how so many prominent politicians and courts went along (and it had to be an informed participation for many) with the scam which ignored the provisions of the various statues on water which stated that “subsidized” water was not to be available to large land owners, specifically setting the acreage limits very low and who deliberately ignored the horrendous cost-benefit ratios involved in many of the projects. It really amounts to massive, willful and fairly public criminal corruption on the part of many, including many liberal notables. As a Californian, I already knew about Edmund G. Brown as a political hack and the profound hypocrisy of his “radical” son Jerry, who dated “Hanoi Jane” Fonda, served two terms as governor of California and is currently serving his second term as Mayor of Oakland, California (population 400,000 in 2000). Jerry’s official “bio” on the City of Oakland website (http://www.oaklandnet.com/government/mayor/biography.html) modestly notes that he “appointed an extraordinary number of women and minorities to high government positions, including the first woman, African-American and Latino to the California Supreme Court …[and] after leaving the Governor’s Office, … spent six months in Japan and worked briefly with Mother Teresa in India…. [and in 1992] defeated Bill Clinton in Maine, Colorado, Vermont, Connecticut, Utah and Nevada during the 1992 Presidential primaries.”

As a historian, I’m not sure what Reisner’s game is when he says “[w]e didn’t have to build main stream dams on rivers carrying vast loads of silt…but federal engineers were enthralled by dams. ….We didn’t have to mine a hundred thousand years’ worth of groundwater in a scant half century…” etc - his emphasis. No but we did. His job is to explain why we did it and he did explain. For him to ask the question, even rhetorically, seems to lessen the impact of his fine work, maybe even cause the reader to question his committment to his own explanations. It seems to me that the real crime is that many of the relevant laws appear to have been written rather realistically, but the politicians and judiciary have let all of us down by not enforcing and reinforcing the law. Reisner has done an important job with his book; the real story though is the prosecutions that should have taken place for malfeasance and misfeasance haven’t.

Becoming Mexican-American and Native Americans

In his Pulitzer prize-winning book The Uprooted: the Epic Story of the Great Migration that Made the American People, Harvard historian Oscar Handlin famously wrote, “once I thought to write a history of the immigrants in America…[but] I discovered that the immigrants were American history.” I think this is the most important idea we should hold as we contemplate and comment on immigration. It seems to me that Sánchez does a very important service by bringing out the details – time, place, political, economic and social conditions – which have affected Mexican immigration into the United States. Among the questions that scholars of immigration in America seem to study are the meaning of American citizenship and the evolution of immigrants’ attachment or lack of attachment to the United States. I thought Becoming Mexican American did an excellent job of identifying the details of the multiple dimensions of these questions as they applied to Mexican immigrants, indicating how they operate in a unique immigrant environment in this country that can support them in so many ways in their identity as Mexicans and at the same time does not require them to make as many cultural changes as individuals in other groups might find necessary if they do not desire to change.

Another particularly interesting and important element of the book is the author’s development of the importance of conditions in Mexico, not only on the decision some Mexicans make to emigrate to the United States, but also on those emigrants while they are in the United States. The historical ethnocentrism of “Anglos” should not be a surprise to graduate students in history and I think the author does a competent job of explaining the reasonable roots of that ethnocentrism as well as the unreasonable ones. Some of the author’s points helped me understand is current issues associated with Mexican immigration and possibly how those issue might be addressed, however it does seem to me that the numbers of Mexican immigrants today and the effects of that immigration on the educational, and social welfare systems in the United States are unprecedented.

In Significant to Whom?: Mexican Americans and the History of the American West, David G. Gutierrez tates that “The most crucial development as a result of expansion and domination is the subsequent construction of elaborate sets of rationales which are designed to explain why one group has conquered another and to establish and perpetuate histories that help set… and enforce… priorities [repress] some subjects in the name of the greater importance of others, [naturalize] certain categories and [disqualify] others.” I think that people construct “elaborate sets of rationales … designed to explain [themselves]” for almost all political and social issues so I don’t find that observation particularly illuminating in the case of Mexican immigration, and Americans are not unique in their “tremendous ability to rationalize and justify …[any type of] expansion” [522] Colonial powers do this unashamedly – the British fought a war against China in the nineteenth century in part to preserve their right to sell opium there, against the wishes of the Chinese government. And it is part of the definition of winning the battle to gain territory that the winner has the “power …to explain what had occurred.” [523] I had not really questioned much of the description of Spanish culture that he describes as the “Spanish fantasy village” so I found that (unverified) idea useful. I do not really understand why a group would expend great effort to come to the United States then “reject liberalism and notion of assimilation.” 528 It seems that if a person vote with their feet to come to a new country, at least SOME aspects of that country recommend themselves to the person.


In Still Native: The Significance of Native Americans in the History of the Twentieth-Century American West Dave Rich Lewis

“In the search for escape and a sense of authenticity in a manufactured world, white Americans have placed American Indians outside history, relegating them to an idealized past that never existed, refusing them to be or become modern….. In the end, all stereotypic images …persist to the detriment of Native American peoples.” 223-4 Deloria talks about the significance of Native Americans but it seems to me that most Americans today know little about the significance of ANY individuals or groups on American history and Native American history has be neglected but it is also more difficult to recover as little of it is recorded in the medium that most in Western society understand best – textual accounts. His simile of the stereoscope is a bit misleading. It is not the depth we miss out on, there are some number of concrete element in the picture that are just flat missing.

I just started on Deloria but I found his discussion of ideology and discourse in the first chapter quite interesting.

Print the Legend Photography and the American West

The author's stated goal was to understand the West and photography together. I didn't find that she made the case that photography had a significant, specific influence on the West or people's perception of the west. There seemed to be a great deal of somewhat interesting detail about the technical limitations of photography between the introduction of the Daguerreotype (1839) and the development of the Kodak camera and flexible film in 1888, however the author made most of her points about this aspect of photography over and over, detracting from its impact. Further it did not seem that the author drew a great representational distinction between techniques such as lithography and photography. It was a useful if relatively elementary treatise on how photographers deliberately and unconsciously manipulated and arranged their subjects. I found the description of the impact of Banvard's moving mural to be at least as interesting as the descriptions of the impact of photography. Statements such as " the meaning in nineteenth century western landscape photographs is a slippery concept," and questions such as "At what point is a photograph created? - The moment it is taken, or back in lab?" are no more answerable today than in the mid nineteenth century and do not particularly advance any point that the author attempts to make.

To my mind the more important questions the author raised were “How did early photography alter and shape the ways in which people formed memories, recollect past and [gain and convey] broader cultural imaginings of the West? and How are photographs to be understood as primary source documents? It seems that the author answered the last question by suggesting that photography should be used with great caution as primary source documents, unless of course you are studying photography itself. I would have liked the author to demonstrate, if possible, how photography actually DID shape cultural imaginings but I think that she did not do that. She discusses how the subjects of photographs often created a reality with a particular pose or staging, but the author offered no evidence to me that these same subjects were deluding themselves or that they were successful in representing themselves to others in a particular way through photography.

Toward the end the author states (p 340) "If photographs have shifting meanings, unstable sorts of messages ... should we discard them as historical documents?" and answers No! She then again implies that they have questionable utility as historical documents - "the very qualities that make old photographs problematic as historical document - their quirky selectiveness, there capacity to sustain shifting meanings, their illusions of veracity, their emphasis on the vernacular - are the very conditions that make them fascinating and compelling." I'm not sure of her "final answer." The best part of the book for me was the author's chapter on Photography and the American Indian. It seemed that Native Americans were interested but at least some Native Americans showed more implicit understanding of photography's value than did the author.

I like photography but I don't take it "seriously." It can be fun and interesting – and on a personal level it can still be a minor drudgery. I enjoy some exhibitions of photography but after having traveled fairly extensively I am highly skeptical that photography generally has great power to usefully depict other places and times.

Women and Gender in the American West

I found almost all of the essays in this book very interesting, and even I think I understood most of them. I was surprised to find even the most of the essays which contained a great deal of theory were written well enough to be intelligible to the general history reader. (Yes in women’s history I put myself in that category) I thought the first essay "The Gentle Tamers Revisited" a very good introduction as it clearly framed many of the important questions and identified the stereotypes. It also informed us that the number and proportion of women in particular areas of the west differed significantly by place and time. The essay Going About and Doing Good: the politics of Benevolence was interesting too in providing detail to a aspect of the social history of San Francisco.

I thought that The Eastmans and the Luhans: Interracial Marriage between White Women and Native American Men was poorly reasoned. . Why would marriage between Mabel Luhan and ANYONE be seen as representative of the “reality” of interracial marriage. Even today her behavior would be considered somewhat eccentric given the “facts” of her sex life. The author asks “Why did Mabel Dodge Luhan and a significant number of white women suddenly become so openly passionate about Indian men?” (p322) How many? How many makes whatever number she postulates “significant?” I don’t think that a “significant” number of people “suddenly” became interested because of the influence of “an emerging anthropological theory- cultural relativism…” (p. 323) While there very well may have been “shifting conceptions of race and gender in the period from 1875 to 1935” I don’t believe that these circumstances, involving hardly “typical” people, make the case. Today there are plenty of stories about the marriages and sexual practices of some show-business celebrities - but they attract publicity just because of the novelty of the practices, their great wealth , their deliberate celebrity or all of the above.

I found portions of “A memory sweet to soldiers…” interesting and other parts hard to understand, sometimes for the theory and sometimes for the argument. After several pages of heavy theory my hopes ran high when I read “ My argument, then, runs like this: Gender is a relation of difference and domination constructed such that is appears “natural” in day-to-day life. The West is historically a place of disrupted gender relations and stunning racial and ethnic diversity, a diversity structured by inequality and injustice.” I would say that gender differences and domination are more than “appearances.” And what makes for “stunning” racial and ethnic diversity? Her statement the “we need to ask what studying gender can do for the history of the West, and what studying the West can do for the politics of gender” does seem to be very true. (p. 499)

I found Johnson's sexual textual analysis to be a bit sophomoric – calling attention to the caption on the cover illustration stating that Calamity Jane in buckskin leveling …. “a pair of cocked revolvers. ” How else does one describe a revolver, the hammer of which is in a position that it may be immediately fired (unless of course it is a "double action" revolver. Just think how she could have worked "double action" into her analysis. Later on (p. 508) she suggests that the book titles in Frontier Women, Westering Women, the Women’s West, Western Women: Their Land Their Lives were "crafted as if to say, ‘The game’s over, boys. It’s my ball and I’m going home.'" This sets up her "clever" double entendre in the next sentence "but the trouble was that the boys had balls too, and so instead of stopping the contest…" WOW.

And Johnson certainly should understand that even if the public HAD KNOWN that Custer allegedly “took sensual pleasure in his cinnamon-scented locks...” he would have been a celebrity, maybe even a hero just BECAUSE he died as he did. Not heroically to everyone but spectacularly nonetheless. If she really doesn’t know that then she needs to do a bit more reading and living in the world that non-academics live in. Analyze that!

Hist 616 Post 3 Jim J. Colony and Empire

Although he makes the claim over and over, I wasn’t convinced by the author’s argument that the metaphor of Colony and Empire was the best one for the relationship involving “the West” with “the East.” Stylistically, I found the author rather dry and repetitive. However, the author had many interesting and important things to say and there is a lot to think about in this book. When I tried to do this blog I found that I could not easily gather and express my thoughts in a way that did justice to the book or my thoughts about it. Certainly the West relied on the East for capital and under the capitalist system those who put up the capital have control. And certainly it is true that those who put up great amounts of capital have always wielded great political power.

I found his section comparing the South and the West to be particularly weak in part because he acknowledges a number of significant differences that did not necessarily illuminate he points on either region. In a book that tried to say so much I could not, in a relatively quick read over a week, fully grasp some of the big ideas he is trying to make. It did seem to me that he found ANY social or economic outcome that did not result in painless change and virtual equality of social and material status as evil and unnatural.

I found the author's choice of words puzzling in many places. For example on page 163 he states that “the flow of investment capital has been one of unequal exchange in which financial and industrial centers persistently draw resource-rich peripheral regions within their spheres of influence.” What is the word “persistently” intended to tell us here? Would it be more logical to expect that capitalist would only “occasionally” attempt to exploit resources? Persistently seems to suggest there is a mindless or deliberately malevolent force at work. He says inhis epilog - page 193 that “The West as Westerners have known it is changing. It will never be the same.” WOW, after all his research – really profound.

Even though I did not agree with many of his points and I did not find his style engaging, I might very well dip into this book again as I feel there are pieces of his prose are worth considering at a more reflective pace.

Jim J. 616 Post for Tombstone and Roaring Camp

I love this western history stuff. I might have been a convert if I’d taken this course earlier in my graduate career. It has given me a direction for a dissertation. All in all one of the best course choices I’ve made at GMU. Yes, Paula, I will tell Professors Censer and Holt that too.

Going to school in northern California in the 1950s and 60s, the gold rush was one of the “important events” of state history. Even sports fans couldn’t get away from it as the San Francisco 49ers was/is our local professional football team. And if you didn’t go camping in the “gold country” you would probably at least would have taken a school field trip to Sutter’s Mill, Oroville or Placerville or some other such place and panned for gold. I greatly enjoyed all these activities. I think I've been to most of the towns that appeared in this book. And everybody in Northern California thinks of the 49er’s sourdough bread as the California “state bread.” But it was fascinating and "educational" to learn that Gold Rush society was even more complex, interesting and exotic than I had realized. I agree with Johnson that most probably think of the 49ers (the gold miners) as white men with a few Chinese and some prostitutes added as leaven. And if you live in California you might well guess that Hispanic people were there too. But Johnson beautifully describes a much more varied social landscape. I was also very impressed that she could tell an interesting social story AND an economic one. It seems often when an author does one well in a single book other dimensions are slighted. All in all the book truly FELT like California. The story that I didn’t know at all, to my chagrin, was that of the Indians of that area. Johnson did a superb job to that too. Calloway would be pleased. There is also alot of Limerick in Johnson’s story: the “West” as a place where cultures and nationalities clash and sometimes cooperate.

As I commented about Roaring Camp, Murder in Tombstone just FEELS right. I am in awe of the detail that the author has presented in such an engaging way. If I had been reading the book to really understand and make a judgment about the gunfight I would have to draw a diagram from myself listing the various stories side-by-side. Unfortunately the pace of a course like this and the need to do things other than study make that impossible. It is a book that I will recommend to my grandchildren though. Before they see too much Hollywood western “history.” This story also brings home to me the difficulty a person experiences when he or she has been exposed to so many different and bowdlerized versions of the OK Corral story, and so many and different characterizations of the Earp brothers by Hollywood stars and television. For a long time I have been unable to bring myself to watch dramatizations of historical events or persons just because they are often so dismissive of the “facts” of the real events, but it strikes me that a movie of the story of the OK Corral that was faithful to this book might very well be interesting, if in the end ambiguous.